Article history: Received 31 July 2013 Received in revised form 4 February 2014 Accepted 4 April 2014 Available online 16 April 2014

The application of rotorcraft to autonomous load carrying and transport is a new frontier for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). This task requires that hovering vehicles remain stable and balanced in flight as payload mass is added to the vehicle. If payload is not loaded centered or the vehicle properly trimmed for offset loads, the robot will experience bias forces that must be rejected. In th...

The metabolic cost of running is substantial, despite the savings from elastic energy storage and return. Previous studies suggest that generating vertical force to support body weight and horizontal forces to brake and propel body mass are the major determinants of the metabolic cost of running. In the present study, we investigated how independently altering body weight and body mass affects ...

Mass customization enhances profitability through a synergy of increasing customer-perceived value and reducing the costs of production and logistics. It inherently makes high value-added products and services possible through premium profits derived from customized products. This strength is particularly attractive to OEM-based industries. This paper discusses the opportunities and challenges ...

We describe an added-mass partitioned (AMP) algorithm for solving fluid-structure interaction (FSI) problems involving inviscid compressible fluids interacting with nonlinear solids that undergo large rotations and displacements. The computational approach is a mixed Eulerian-Lagrangian scheme that makes use of deforming composite grids (DCG) to treat large changes in the geometry in an accurat...

In the Higgs mechanism, mediators of the weak force acquire masses by interacting with the Higgs condensate, leading to a vector boson mass matrix. On the other hand, a rigid body accelerated through an inviscid, incompressible and irrotational fluid feels an opposing force linearly related to its acceleration, via an added-mass tensor. We uncover a striking physical analogy between the two eff...

This paper uses Sequential Action Control (SAC), a model-based method for control of non-linear systems, for fast, optimal trajectory-tracking tasks in the presence of fluid drift. Through the benchmark example of the kinematic car, it is shown that SAC outperforms a traditional offline projection based optimization technique in terms of control effort and objective cost. Motivated by recent wo...

The antero-posterior mass distribution of quadrupeds varies substantially amongst species, yet the functional implications of this design characteristic remain poorly understood. During trotting, the forelimb exerts a net braking force while the hindlimb exerts a net propulsive force. Steady speed locomotion requires that braking and propulsion of the stance limbs be equal in magnitude. We pred...

The transfer of momentum from an animal to fluid in its wake is fundamental to many swimming and flying modes of locomotion. Hence, properties of the wake are commonly studied in experiments to infer the magnitude and direction of locomotive forces. The determination of which wake properties are necessary and sufficient to empirically deduce swimming and flying forces is currently made ad hoc. ...